Piecework

And while many of the dead remained unburied in the week after the earthquakes, jammed among the slabs of the fallen buildings, everyone talked about the future. Mexico will never be the same again: the phrase was repeated over and over again in the newspapers. There were calls from the left and right for investigation of the corruption that led to the faulty construction of so many new buildings; there were demands that Mexico decentralize the government, sending many ministries to other cities; there were suggestions that the ruined sites be converted into parks, to allow some green open spaces for Mexico City to cleanse its lungs. Some insisted that Mexico would have to postpone its payments on foreign debt until after reconstruction.

And there were a few published reminders of another earthquake, far to the south, that had led to the eventual overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. That 1972 earthquake killed thousands too. And when the generosity of the world sent money, supplies, medicine, clothes to Managua, Somoza and his gang stole it. The great fear of some Mexicans is that the same massive robbery will happen here, that the endemic, systemic corruption will absorb most, if not all, of the money that should be spent on the people of Tepito and Colonia Roma, on the survivors of Tlatelolco and the Juarez housing project and all the other ruined places of the city. If that happens, Mexico will not require agents of the Evil Empire to provoke the long-feared all-consuming revolution.

VILLAGE VOICE,

October 8, 1985

UNDER LOWRY’S VOLCANO

The novel can be read simply as a story which you can skip if you want. It can be read as a story you will get more out of if you don’t skip. It can be regarded as a kind of symphony, or in another way as a kind of opera — or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, and so forth. It is superficial, profound, entertaining, and boring, according to taste. It is a prophecy, a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie.

— Malcolm Lowry to Jonathan Cape

January 2, 1946

The novel was, of course, Under the Volcano. Lowry began writing it in December 1936, when he was twenty-seven, and finished the final draft on Christmas Eve 1944. He finished almost nothing else in his life, certainly no other major novel, as he lurched through the United States, Mexico, Tahiti, Italy, and the emptiness of British Columbia, forever a long way from home. He was by his own account an alcoholic, often falling into delirium tremens, sometimes collapsing into Mexican jails or charity wards; he was a terrible husband to both of his wives; he was by most accounts the sort of drunk who would pass a certain point and become a disgusting bore. But about one thing he was certain, and so are we: With Under the Volcano, he made a masterpiece.

When the book at last was published in 1947, critical praise was virtually unanimous (one notable exception was Jacques Barzun, who felt Lowry’s novel was “derivative and pretentious”). The critics marveled at its classical structure, its dense, layered texture, its feeling for history, its use of myth and symbols, and its powerful examination of an alcoholic’s descent into damnation. Lowry’s language was baroque, intense, difficult — a style in direct contrast to the many neo-Hemingways who flourished at the time.

But there was more to the novel’s reception than Lowry’s literary accomplishment. There was also the legend of Lowry, the man. In many ways, he was a throwback to the romantic tradition of the artist consumed by his art to the point of self-destruction. Tales of his drunken escapades were common knowledge in literary circles; such a man was no isolated inhabitant in an academic ivory tower; he was down there carousing with the bandits and groveling with the cockroaches on the floor of the cantina, passing through paradise on the way to the inferno. The novel was not a huge popular success, selling only thirty thousand copies in its first ten years of existence, but that, of course, helped feed the legend; nothing enhances the romantic agony better than neglect. And later the legend was made complete by the squalid facts of Lowry’s death.